Transportation conference in Eastern Panhandle for first time

October 3, 2012

MARTINSBURG - The West Virginia Department of Transportation's annual Transportation Planning and Programming Conference is being held in the Eastern Panhandle this week for the first time.

More than 120 transportation professionals from around the state are expected to attend the conference. It started Tuesday and continues through Thursday at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center in Shepherdstown.

The state Transportation Department partnered with the local Metropolitan Planning Organization to bring the conference to the Eastern Panhandle, Rob Pennington, director of WVDOT's Program Planning and Administration Division, said Tuesday.

"There's a lot of focus on our region," Bob Gordon, director of the Hagerstown Eastern Panhandle Metropolitan Planning Organization, said Tuesday during a break in the presentations.

The Hagerstown Eastern Panhandle MPO includes Berkeley and Jefferson counties in West Virginia and Washington County in Maryland. HEP MPO is the federally designated transportation planning organization for the urbanized areas of the Eastern Panhandle and Washington County.

Gordon said several of the presentations feature either ongoing or completed transportation projects in Berkeley and Jefferson counties, such as the Edwin Miller Boulevard pedestrian pathway study, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park alternative transportation study and the Fairfax Boulevard Complete/Green Street Plan in Ranson and Charles Town.

Having the conference in the Eastern Panhandle exposes public- and private-sector transportation officials from the rest of the state to this part of the state, Gordon said.

"This is their first trip to the Eastern Panhandle for a lot of the attendees," he said. "It opens their eyes to the growth and development here. It focuses on our realities on the ground that we must address."

The conference also allows local officials to get to know their counterparts from other parts of the state.

"They can see how we did things, and we can see how they did things," Gordon said.